![]() ![]() The trauma of her enslaved past still obviously haunts Sethe and her surviving daughter, Denver. The excerpt comes from the opening chapter of the novel which begins detailing the family’s post-war life on 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati. In the novel Beloved, Morrison imagines what might have happened if defiant woman like Garner (envisioned through the character of Sethe) had survived long enough to experience freedom with her broken family in Ohio. ![]() She apparently died from typhoid in 1858. Following a dramatic fugitive slave hearing, Garner and her surviving children were then sold into Toni Morrison (Princeton) Cornered by federal marshals in Cincinnati, Garner killed one of her daughters before officials managed to stop her desperate act of resistance. Beloved (1987) is a novel based loosely on the tragic story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who sought freedom with her children, escaping from Kentucky to Ohio in 1856. She worked in publishing before entering academics where she taught for many years as a professor of humanities at Princeton University. Morrison was born in Ohio and graduated from Howard University. Toni Morrison (1931-2019) became the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, recognizing her achievements as a leading novelist of the Black experience in the United States. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn’t get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. ![]()
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